Learning Manipulation-Sufficient Representations via Outcome Bottlenecks
Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The study evaluated 281 imitation‑learning policies across seven families in 1,700 real‑robot trials of RJ45 connector grasping and insertion with a five‑fingered hand. Controlled ablations revealed that observation and action representations—such as ROI cropping, robot‑base framing, and point‑encoder normalization for point‑cloud policies, and absolute action prediction for vision‑language‑action policies—drastically improved success rates. Among 67 offline metrics, only five measures of predicted‑motion smoothness and directness correlated reliably with real‑world success, indicating that offline metrics can help shortlist policies but cannot replace actual robot testing.
The paper introduces 2AM, a system that separates memory and action execution in long‑horizon robot manipulation. 2AM stores task memory exclusively in a multimodal Agent, while a single RGB‑based, stateless Action Model performs motion based on language and optional 2D hints. On the LIBERO‑Mem benchmark, 2AM achieves 76.3% average completion—over 61 points higher than the best baseline—demonstrating that agent‑side memory and precise steering of the Action Model can substantially improve performance.
arXiv:2607. 09825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation policies rely on pre-trained vision models that give either a global scene embedding or a dense patch grid.
Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging. We identify two critical mismatches: wrist-mounted fisheye views, with severe radial distortion and local gripper-centric perspectives, are out-of-distribution for pretrained VLMs; and human-collected trajectories frequently violate kinematic limits, incur collisions, or exceed controller bandwidth, teaching VLA policies physically infeasible actions.
arXiv:2609.05588v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: World-action models (WAM) predict future states to guide robot actions, enabling learning from both action-free video and action-labeled inte...
arXiv:2606. 04708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging.